Alright guys. Welcome back to another week of my rambling nonsense. Today I’m going to talk about Writing VS Typing. I don’t have a whole lot to say about this, so it will be a pretty short post.
First of all, I must mention that I am a big fan of writing rather than typing my books. That isn’t to say that I don’t enjoy typing. I’m rather fast and wouldn’t mind having access to a computer to do things like write reports or make blog posts but when writing a book, I prefer to hand write it. Because of this preference I think that some of my opinions are slightly biased. If you don’t agree with me, you can ignore me. These posts are for me to share what I think and for you to take out of it what you want.
Alright so as I said I prefer writing to typing. The reason this is, is because sometimes I can type faster than I can think. When I write by hand I tend to write slower because if I write to quickly my hand writing becomes unreadable. So this forces me to slow down and that gives me time to think of the next sentence or even where I am going with the scene before I arrive at actually writing that part of the story. This gives me the ability to write and write and write for pages without losing the string of the story. When I type I’ll get to the end of a sentence and not have the next sentence and so I’ll just type the over and over again so that my document looks like this:
He scaled the castle wall, hands grasping at the rough stones. The the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the He reached the top and pulled himself over gasping for air. He stared at the blue sky and thought the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the That was harder then I thought it would be.
Its not to fun to edit. So I tend to write everything by hand. I also mentioned before in my last post I am easily distracted by the internet! Its such a temptation! When I write on my computer (which I will admit I have been doing more of now that I have Zenwriter) I get distracted by all the colorful glowing icons at the bottom of my screen. They give me all sorts of ideas of time wasters that I suddenly HAVE to do. When I write by hand I often sit at my desk and my laptop is in my bag and my phone is charging upstairs. This distracts me less. I have more time to think about my book and don’t get distracted by the sudden idea of the internet.
On the plus side of writing on a computer I can create as many documents as I want. I can organize my folders by series and then inside that folder I can organize by book and inside that folder I can organize by chapter. I can add a folder for characters or worlds or designs. I can have all sorts of organizing capabilities and the amount of documents I create is only as limited as my computers space. When you write by hand you have to buy a notebook. When you fill that notebook you have to buy another one. If you’re like me you can’t start a book in one notebook and then leave it and then come back and write a different one in that same notebook. You have to have a different notebook for every book that you write. Sometimes when you rewrite a book you get another notebook for that. Then it gets harder and harder to organize these books because of all the stuff you have accumulated.
This problem might also only be because I have a great obsession with buying notebooks. Who knows. But this is a negative side to writing by hand that typing is better for.
Another negative is that I will eventually have to transfer my hand written manuscript to the computer. My hand writing is nearly unreadable to anybody but me and over time words get smudged and sentences get lost. I have to constantly keep up to date with my transference which takes a lot of time that, now that I’m an adult, I just don’t have time for.
So there you go. These are the reasons I write by hand and the reasons I don’t type my books. (Mostly.) Looking back at this post maybe I should just type everything. I think I’ve almost convinced myself. Look at those convincing negatives to handwriting. Money and Time…. Hmm… I think I’ll stick to hand writing for now.
Next week I’m going to write on Ideal writing spaces. Next week’s post is a suggestion post. I would like everyone who reads this post to send me an email about your favorite writing space. Where do you like to write? Is it a quiet spot in the library? The middle of a noisy café? Or are you like me and like to write in your room? Send me an email or you can just contact me on the contact page of my site. If I don’t get any suggestions I’ll just write about what I like to do when I write.
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